sacraments

“Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God… And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” I John 5

The Epistle for this Sunday establishes the fact that Christians are those who have been born again, born of God and thus Christians have God as their Father and they have already entered into eternal life; that is, born again Christians, because they have God as their Father, participate in the life of God which is the only eternal life there is. But how is it that our flesh and blood can participate in the eternal life of God? The Gospel for this Sunday is the well known story of the evening of the resurrection of our Lord. Easter Sunday begins with the morning of the resurrection while the First Sunday after Easter begins with the evening of the resurrection. The narratives of Easter tell the story of Mary Magdalene searching for Jesus’ crucified body and discovering instead Jesus Christ resurrected, glorified on the doorstep of the tomb in broad daylight. The narrative for this Sunday tells the story of Jesus coming to his disciples who had gathered in a lighted room, probably the very room in which he had instituted the Holy Communion. Outside the room the dark night surrounded Jerusalem. But Christ, who is the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, stood in their midst, his dazzling body bearing those dear tokens of his passion; he lit up their hearts. Not only did they believe in his resurrection, but he gave them the very commission that his Father had given him before the world was which he verified, confirmed, and authenticated by ordaining them with the apostolic power of absolution:

“And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” John 22: 22-23

That is a lot to take in and so this Sunday I want to put to you a principle, an axiom that will help you understand how God’s will for humanity and God’s Word to humanity advance in time; that is how God’s will and God’s Word develops in history. The principle I want you to get, the axiom that I want you to take hold of is one you have heard touched upon in sermons before and it is this: “Grace perfects nature without destroying nature.”

God does not discard creation — he retains it, appropriates it, he assumes and widens it into a higher state of being, thus perfecting it. But I want to take this a step further: Not only does grace perfect nature without destroying nature, but in God’s real world, grace requires nature. So what that means is that grace is not something added onto nature like you would add a second story to your home, but rather grace is the thing that completes and perfects nature.

But what is grace? When I was growing up we were taught that grace is unmerited favor; the free and undeserved help that God gave us in order that we might respond to his call be to his children. Though that is partially correct, I want to give you another definition of grace from a slightly different angle and that is grace as a state of being: Grace is participation in the life of God. To be in a state of grace is to be participating in the life of the God who is God which is equivalent to participating in eternal life. How does that happen? The way we normally begin to participate in the life of God is though our incorporation into the human nature of Jesus Christ. That is what the Fathers meant when they said, “God became man in order that man might become god.” How does that happen? How are we incorporated into the human nature of Jesus Christ? The way we are normally incorporated into the human nature of Jesus Christ is through Holy Baptism and once incorporated we are nurtured in the Church as we appropriate the other sacraments especially the Holy Communion. The sacraments are instruments that infuse and nurture a state of grace. So when I say that, “Grace perfects nature without destroying nature” I mean that our participation in the life of God perfects our human nature; it does not make us something other, either more or less, than human beings. It enables us to achieve our full potential as human beings.

Of first importance is to realize that God does not discard creation. It is the way of the world to discard one thing for another, to abandon the old for the new; the world seems to wear out and it is replaced. It may seem right, even natural, to us at first; it seems fitting to cast much of nature on the scrap pile in order to rebuild. That is a prime example of the world’s way of thinking is a prime example of what the children of God overcome by faith which is what the epistle for this Sunday acknowledges. It is the way of the world to think and live according to the principle of destruction but that is not God’s way of doing things.

Let me give you some examples of how this principle works in various ways. This is an example I have used many times in the past: St. Paul was originally an enemy of Jesus Christ and his narrative once was the story of a man named Saul whose life was driven by his love for Israel, his love for the Law and his enmity toward Christ. It was Saul’s judgment that Christ and his followers were in the most dangerous way very much out of touch with reality specifically because they were out of touch with the reality of the Law. Within Saul’s horizon his devotion to the destruction of Christ and his Church was noble and righteous because he believed that Christ and his Church were leading the people of God to destruction. Then Paul was converted to Jesus the Messiah and that changed everything — but not in the way that the world would have expected. Paul did not merely switch allegiances, he entered a state of grace, a state of participation in the very life of the God who is God. He did not reassign Israel to a scrapheap and his deep, personal love for Israel only grew deeper, wider, higher and complete as he yearned and prayed for his kinsmen’s conversion to Jesus the Messiah. My point is that Paul’s former Jewish horizon was not discarded, but in a state of grace, participating in the life of the God who is God, Paul Jewish horizon was assumed, enlarged, transformed, and perfected. He did not hate Israel nor did he hate the Law, rather he came to see and to declare that Israel had not been cast away by God, but rather Israel has been assumed, enlarged, transformed and perfected first through Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection and since Pentecost Israel has been assumed, enlarged, transformed and perfected in Holy Mother Church. Supersessionism is in error because it takes the position that Israel has been replaced and thus discarded for the Church which is a failure to see that grace perfects nature rather than annihilating nature.

Let me give you another example from last week — the tableau of the angels setting on the stone slab where the body of Jesus had lain wrapped in the bloody shroud provided by Thomas and Nicodemus. I pointed out to you that that was a living icon presented by John in order to communicate to the Church that in Jesus the intentions of the sacrifices summed up in the Mercy Seat were assumed, enlarged, transformed and perfected in this scene. The Mercy Seat of Moses is perfected, and by perfected I mean it had achieved it perfect end, God’s finality, in the Mercy Seat Mary found the first Easter morning. The Mercy Seat of Moses is not set aside or thrown onto the scrap heap of history. It is the way of the world to destroy and caste away. God continues to retain, to assume, to enlarge, to transform, and to perfect his works. It may even be the case that St. John’s vision of the Ark of the Covenant in Heaven as recorded in Revelation 11:19 carries forward this very point that God retains but transforms without destroying and in such a way that the thing achieves its finality and frequently that perfect end is achieved in a way we could not have guessed. And so the Mercy Seat that Mary discovered, retained, assumed, enlarged, transformed, and perfected the Mercy Seat of the Old Testament, while at the same time the Mercy Seat that Mary discovered is itself assumed, enlarged, transformed, and perfected in yet another Mercy Seat. On the night in which he was betrayed Jesus said:

“For this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.”

Specifically the final Mercy Seat which assumes and transforms the Mercy Seat of the Old Testament, and assumes the Mercy Seat of Calvary is the Altar of God where the Holy Communion is celebrated daily and will continue to be celebrated till he returns. One final example of how grace perfects nature without destroying nature:

“Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord.” John 22: 19-20

The narrative for this Sunday tells the story of Jesus coming to his disciples who had gathered in a lighted room, behind closed doors because they feared what the Jewish authorities would do next. Outside the room the dark night surrounded Jerusalem. But Christ, who is the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, stood in their midst, his body bearing those dear tokens of his passion. In other words the Jesus that appeared to his disciple when the first Easter Day came to an end was the same Jesus in the same body that was nailed to the Cross of Calvary. As I said at the beginning today to really grasp the analogy of faith requires of us to take it a step further: Not only does grace perfect nature without destroying nature, but in God’s real world, grace requires nature. The human body of Jesus has been changed and it has taken on qualities that are entirely new for human beings. When the text indicates that suddenly “came Jesus and stood in the midst” that means that our time-honored, customary way of getting into a room, by walking through the front door, will become obsolete. Furthermore, Jesus’s body was recognized by everyone in that room to be Jesus’ body and not someone else’s body which mean that in the resurrection though our bodies will emerge transformed as creatures of beauty, agility and unimagined powers, we and others will still recognize us for who we are as well as who we have become in a state of grace. As a winged Monarch Butterfly emerges from the state of being a worm, the fact of the matter is that the worm was made, the worm was fitted to become a Monarch. In other words it was the nature of the worm to end up with splendid wings and to float into the clouds.

Now one last thing: I do not understand why God works this way. I do not understand why he loves this clunky, fleshy, material stuff and I do not understand why it takes what seems to me an inordinate long time to get from one thing to the other. Why go through all this stuff and all this time to get to where God wants to take his creation? Why do we have to go through all the Old Testament narratives to get to the New Testament? Why not just get on with the Incarnation and get it all done rather than to have one narrative after another opening up new narratives that in their turn open up new narratives? I do not know. But I do know we have a tendency to blame everything we do not understand as well as things we find formidable, wearisome and onerous — have a tendency to blame it on the Fall. But I do not think that the time required for matter to reach perfection is a result of sin because time itself, marked by such phrases as “the first day,” was part of God’s work and clearly maturation over time was part of the story world of Genesis before the Fall. And that is enough for today.

Mass Schedule – Week of Lent III (March 8, 2015)

+ In the year 320, Constantine was Emperor of the West and Licinius of the East. Licinius, under pressure from Constantine, had agreed to legalize Christianity in his territory, and the two made an alliance (cemented by the marriage of Licinius to Constantia the sister of Constantine), but now Licinius broke the alliance and made a new attempt to suppress Christianity. He ordered his soldiers to repudiate it on pain of death. In the “Thundering Legion,” stationed near Sebaste in Armenia (now Sivas in Turkey), forty soldiers refused, and when promises, threats, and beatings failed to shake them, they were stripped naked one evening and herded onto the middle of a frozen lake, and told, “You may come ashore when you are ready to deny your faith.” To tempt them, fires were built on shore, with warm baths, blankets, clothing, and hot food and drink close by. As night deepened, thirty-nine men stood firm, while one broke and ran to the shore. However, one of the soldiers standing guard on shore was so moved by the steadfastness of the Christians that he stripped off his clothes and ran out to join them. They welcomed him into their company, and so the number of the martyrs remained at forty, and by morning, all were dead of exposure.

+ Only two popes, Leo I and Gregory I, have been given the popular title of “the Great.” Both served during difficult times of barbarian invasions in Italy; and during Gregory’s term of office, Rome was also faced with famine and epidemics.Gregory was born around 540, of a politically influential family, and in 573 he became Prefect of Rome; but shortly afterwards he resigned his office and began to live as a monk. In 579 he was made apocrisiarius (representative of the Pope to the Patriarch of Constantinople). Shortly after his return home, the Pope died of the plague, and in 590 Gregory was elected Pope.Like Leo before him, he became practical governor of central Italy, because the job needed to be done and there was no one else to do it. When the Lombards invaded, he organized the defense of Rome against them, and the eventual signing of a treaty with them. When there was a shortage of food, he organized the importation and distribution of grain from Sicily.

His influence on the forms of public worship throughout Western Europe was enormous. He founded a school for the training of church musicians, and Gregorian chant (plainchant) is named for him. The schedule of Scripture readings for the various Sundays of the year, and the accompanying prayers (many of them written by him), in use throughout most of Western Christendom for the next thirteen centuries, is largely due to his passion for organization. His treatise, On Pastoral Care, while not a work of creative imagination, shows a dedication to duty, and an understanding of what is required of a minister in charge of a Christian congregation.

English-speaking Christians will remember Gregory for sending a party of missionaries headed Augustine of Canterbury to preach the Gospel to the pagan Anglo-Saxon tribes that had invaded England and largely conquered or displaced the Celtic Christians previously living there. Gregory had originally hoped to go to England as a missionary himself, but was pressed into service elsewhere, first as apocrisiarius and then as bishop of Rome. He accordingly sent others, but took an active interest in their work, writing numerous letters both to Augustine and his monks and to their English converts.

It was in Gregory’s lifetime that Rome, and with it the Western Empire, with astonishing suddenness became monolingual. For more than six centuries previously Greek had been spoken at Rome along with Latin and every educated Roman spoke, read, and wrote in both languages. Paul’s epistle to the Romans and indeed the whole New Testament was written in Greek. Everyone involved in shipping and commerce, from banker to stevedore, spoke Greek. The list of the early Bishops of Rome has a fair proportion of Greek names. But in Gregory’s lifetime this changed. Gregory was ambassador to the Eastern Patriarch at Constantinople for six years, but he never bothered to learn Greek. And in his day it seems that most other Latin-speakers did not trouble to learn Greek either. The already existing difficulties of communication between Latin and Greek theologians were greatly exacerbated by this development. Increasingly, Latins did not read the commentaries and other writings of Greek Christians, and vice versa. Thus differences between the two that dialogue might have resolved were left to accumulate, culminating in the formal split between Latin and Greek Christendom in 1054.

+ The Monday Morning Bible Study is working through 40 Minute Bible Study Series by Precept entitled “The Essentials of Effective Prayer”, by Kay Arthur and David and BJ Lawson will be started. As we prepare to celebrate our Lord’s resurrection on Easter Sunday, we take the time during Lent to examine ourselves and ask the Lord, as did David in Psalm 139:23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.” Going back to the essentials of our prayer life is key to our preparation for Jesus’ Passion and His glorious resurrection. The study will last six weeks. For further information contact Priscilla King at [email protected].

+ We need some volunteers to cook for the Wednesday Agape.

+ This coming Wednesday is Agape & Christian Education and I hope you all can come out as well as bring a friend. Thanks goes out to all our cooks, teachers, and helpers and especially to Jackie Jamison for her leadership in organizing and developing our Wednesday Agape. Jackie says, “Things will proceed similarly to last year with three classes led by the same teachers (Sr. Lynda for the preschoolers, me for the elementary kids, and Charlie for upper elementary and middle school). All teachers please remember that class is over at 7:15.

+ All Saints Men’s Group will meets each Tuesday at 7:00 a.m. in undercroft.

+ The Holy Communion is celebrated Monday through Saturday at 12:15 p.m.

+ All Saints parishioner may obtain a Mass card from the Church office. A Mass card is a greeting card given to someone to inform him or her that a deceased loved one or friend was remembered and prayed for at a weekly Mass. It is a specifically Christian way to express one’s love. Call Julie McDermott at the Church office (434-979-2842) and she will help you fill out the form. The celebrant will sign the card and we will mail it from the Church to the family of the loved one.

“Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits. Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shall heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but over come evil with good.” Romans 12: 14-21

I said last week that what we have grown accustom to call “spiritual gifts” are gifts distributed by God to individual Christian, some natural, some of a supernatural origin in Baptism, and those gifts are meant for the knitting together as well as the fostering of the growth & development of the Body of Christ which is the visible parish. This last section of Romans chapter 12 answers the question: How should the Church and her children behave in the world that is incapable of sharing our horizon? We share as much as we can Jesus’ horizon and that knits us together and fosters our growth corporately and individually. And each of us, to authentically share Jesus’ horizon, has experienced at least one and frequently more than one conversion. The world knows nothing of Christian conversion and to live as Christians in this world we have to remain attentive to that fact. So what Paul is doing at this point in Romans 12 amounts to putting meat on the bone of phrases our Lord uttered in John 15 & 17 where he said his Church and her children are “in the world but not of the world.” What does Jesus expect of his Church who is still in the world?

Remember that when Paul wrote the Christians in Rome he addressed a few dozen people scattered throughout a city with a population close to 1,000,000 people. Christians were not a people with any power or wealth. One or two families, probably merchants, had the power of personal wealth and Paul addressed them when he spoke of the gift of giving.

It is fair to assume that during his 2 year stay in Rome, Paul ordained apostles, which office eventually came to be called the episcopate or as we say, the bishop. Certainly by the year 90, about 35 years after Paul wrote the epistle, each house church had a priest/bishop who’s job was to preach the message of the Apostles, to celebrate the Holy Communion, and to oversee the care of the poor, the sick and the widows. That is approximately what it looked like in Rome until around 110 when things began to change rapidly with lots of growth in the house churches, significant cooperation and sharing between the little parishes, and a centralized treasury for the aid of Christians inside and outside the city. Even so Christians were mostly invisible and when Christians were noticed they were at first considered wacky and weird — not good citizens, but not really a menace to worry Rome.

Urban life for Christian families was a life immersed in the Roman ancestral tradition in which the Roman family, the nursery of Roman virtue and the most basic building block of Roman society, was ruled by the paterfamilias. Roman ancestral virtue meant everything to the citizens of Rome – to be a good man or a good woman was to be a good citizen and a good member of one’s family. Fides and pietas are words we know as faith and piety and we cannot but think of them in terms of Church. We think of the faith and the faithfulness of Jesus or the piety of Mary Magdalene. But as Roman virtues, fides and pietas are not equivalent to Christian virtues. For Romans, fides is the trustworthy, reliable Roman, a family man who may be relied upon to be a Roman. The goddess Fides whose temple was built around 240 BC on one of the Seven Hills close to the Forum personified the virtue. The goddess Pietas was regarded by Romans as the figure, the image, today we might say the avatar, of the virtue of pietas which was understood as religious duty, but especially filial piety. Gravitas was the virtue of dignified self-control, which sounds good till you hear the narrative of Gaius Scaevola, who in founding the Republic demonstrated the great strength of his gravitas by holding his hand in a fire. Dignitas – the upshot of all virtues — was the sum of the man’s reputation and personal influence, accrued through out his life of service to city and family — with all the weight placed on one’s outward reputation, rank and influence. Dignitas is entirely focused on the external and it has nothing to one’s interior life.

The Roman historian Valerius Maximus collected close to 1,000 stories and legends and published them during the reign of Tiberius Caesar under the title Nine Books of Memorial Deeds and Sayings of the Ancient Romans. The stories of the gods and goddesses, religious and civic festivals, and the legends of Greece and Rome were the pedagogical tools for the formation of civic and family virtue. I am telling you all this because I want you to have a little flavor of the milieu the first Roman Christians lived in when Paul wrote his epistle. Paul addresses by name 27 people in Romans 16 who were living in Rome and worshipping Jesus the Messiah and what I have just summarized for you was as sure to Romans as the Mosaic Law and narratives of the Old Testament were sure to Jews.

How should the Church and her children behave in a world that is incapable of sharing our horizon? After all Christians still had to work for a living, Christians still have to buy food at the market, when Christians were taken ill they needed a doctor, when a Christian died he has to be buried somewhere, and children had to be educated, mentored in a trade or profession, and one day have their own families and their own children. There was of course no way that Christian parents could insulate their children from the pagan world, which was the real world for just about everyone else in Rome. In this pagan milieu some Christians were hesitant to make their loyalties known to those outside the Church not so much out of fear but out of being laughed at and not taken seriously. Christian parents who wanted the best for their children if they could afford it acquired the only education available in pagan elementary, grammar, and rhetorical schools. There exist a Christian child’s school notebook of the 4th century. In his pagan classes the child has recorded mythological names and poems about Roman gods, goddesses, as well as moral lessons and obscene stories. Still each time the Christian child began a new page he drew a cross and Chi Rho, the monogram of Christ. The point is even stronger when you consider that several of the Christians named by Paul in Romans 16 are named after pagan gods or writers.

“Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits. Recompense to no man evil for evil.”

The way of life that Paul is insistent upon for Christians is exactly the kind of behavior that would make no sense what-so-ever to the pagans of Rome because it lies beyond their horizon. That was indeed a culture war and one that eventually required the Christian’s willing death to what everyone else thought was the real world. Being baptized into Jesus means dying with Jesus as well as rising to a new life with Jesus, a new life that involves imitating and internalizing his way of life, his horizon. And so we see that Paul essentially takes Jesus’ teaching from the Sermon on the Mount and assumes that we not only can, but we ought to live accordingly.

“Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.”

Paul is concerned that Christians behave toward their pagan neighbors in a manner that may be summed up as an imitation of Christ, but for Paul one’s behavior is an external signifier, a sign of one’s very real interior life. But the important point is that we imitate Jesus the Messiah who did not curse those who mistreated and eventually crucified him, but rather he prayed for their forgiveness and he blessed them. To a Roman such a response to mistreatment was a sign of weakness and such weak behavior would cover one’s self, one’s city, and one’s family with shame. But for Christians, as distasteful as it may be, cursing, wishing evil upon the person who has harmed you, is simply irreconcilable to following Jesus. On the other hand we ought to be quick to share our neighbor’s joy and we ought to be quick in sharing our neighbor’s sorrow and heartbreak. Further more Paul says that Christians should not pursue power alliances but rather the Christian ought to pursue affiliation and caring relations with those from whom you think you have nothing to gain. It is unmistakable that Paul wants the Christians in Rome to avoid hiding out in ghettos and rather to be Christian in word and deed. But please realize just how off-putting, how repellent and offensive it would be to pagan Romans to bless people to go on the attack against you. And the same can be said for taking up caring relations with the weak, the poor, and the powerless. Such behavior, intended or not, dishonored Roman virtues and scorns Rome’s illusion of power. But Paul was not setting out to bring down Roman culture; he was rather setting out to be faithful to Jesus the Messiah, not fight a culture war.

“Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shall heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but over come evil with good.”

Now for the third time Paul forbids retaliation and obviously he means this inside or outside the Church. Do not curse those who persecute you; do not repay evil with evil; do not take revenge on anyone. For Christians to take vengeance upon anyone, even if they have really been harmed by the person, is to behave as though God has deserted us and we have to take matters into our own hands. Instead of giving into private retribution Paul instructs Christians to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty and thereby one “shall heap coals of fire on his head,” which might be taken to mean that Paul is recommending a passive-aggressive course of action. It is as though Paul is saying, “Don’t get mad, just wait, and God will get even,” which hardly qualifies for “repaying evil with good.” But recall poetical use of burning coals in the Old Testament: “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord high and lifted up…” declares Isaiah who is in awe at the sight of God Almighty upon his throne, the smoke of incense filling the Temple, angels hiding their eyes from the sight his holiness all actions of sound and sense declare to everyone what is really real in life:

“‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!
And the doorposts moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.”

The vision is so loud that it drowns out the political world Isaiah had taken as reality when quickly become aware of where he is and before whom he stood:

“Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips and my eyes have the seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

At which point an angel takes a live coal from the Altar into his hand and places it upon Isaiah’s mouth and declares that it has taken away his sin. Thus I submit to you that Paul is saying that treating one’s enemies with loving kindness, not permitting evil to get the upper hand in one’s life, turning the tables, overcoming evil with goodness, is not only right because it is an imitation of Jesus, but such behavior may also become the instrument that brings one’s enemy to remorse and eventual conversion to Jesus the Messiah – making the enemy a brother.